


not to dream all my dream

by skazkanasmorka



Category: Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Genre: Bondage, Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Gender Role Reversal, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 02:11:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17051093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazkanasmorka/pseuds/skazkanasmorka
Summary: Maleficent curses Phillip to perish by the prick of a spindle.





	not to dream all my dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Musyc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Musyc/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!

“Listen well, all of you! The prince shall indeed grow in courage and strength, beloved by all who know him. But, before the sun sets on his eighteenth birthday, he shall prick his finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die.” Maleficent’s pronouncement thundered in the Great Hall, amplified by the tense silence of the onlookers and the stone buttresses arching above them. Foreboding clouds thickened above the atrium, drowning the revelers in gloom. As the last resounding echoes of the prophesy died away, the crowd turned as one to gauge the king’s reaction. 

“Oh, is that it?” King Stefan said and leaned back in his throne. “Well, that’s fine.”

One end of Maleficent’s thin lips curled. “Pleased to be of service, my liege.”

Queen Leah and the three fairies looked at him in disbelief. The queen placed a hand on his arm and murmured, “Perhaps we could exercise some measure of caution, dear.”

King Stefan laughed. “When would my son ever be in the same room as a spindle? He shall learn how to govern this country in the stables, the fields, the training ground, the armory, the libraries, the war room! He’s more likely to perish on the battlefield than to exchange words with a seamstress.” 

“Hush,” Queen Leah hissed. 

“Is that so?” Maleficent said. “In any case, Diablo and I shall take our leave – you have made it amply clear that we are not worthy of this illustrious gathering, and I have nothing more to do now that I have bestowed my gift upon the little one.” 

With a whirl of her cloak, Maleficent vanished. The dark clouds dissipated along with her. No lightning was summoned, no halberds pointed. 

In the renewed light, the noblemen averted their eyes from each other, fearful that they might be called upon to take action. Meanwhile, the knights looked at each other with bemusement, uncertain whether they had failed in their duty. The confrontation had gone pear-shaped, somehow. Their muscles had been tensed, their senses buzzing, ready to launch an attack at the first signal from their king. But she had left of her own accord, and the king seemed less than perturbed at the death sentence cast upon his only son. None of them could conceive of what, precisely, they might be asked to do, and myriad unpleasant possibilities pooled in their stomachs.

Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather backed away from the bassinet and regarded the sleeping prince carefully. Saliva bubbled and burst from his rosy lips. His chubby fingers clutched a gold chain, the betrothal gift that Princess Aurora, the daughter of King Hubert, had deposited onto the blankets swaddling him. Queen Leah walked over, lifted him, and cradled her newborn in her arms, her worry undiminished by her husband’s nonchalance. 

Flora broke the silence. “Your Majesties, Merryweather still has yet to grant her gift….”

Without lifting her eyes from her baby, Queen Leah said, “Is there any way to reverse the curse?”

King Stefan snorted and said, “Maleficent wasted her powers on this one – perhaps she mistook the boy for a princess!” 

“Maleficent is as wise as she is cruel. I don’t believe it prudent to scoff at this curse,” the queen said. “Merryweather, if there’s anything you could do.”

“Maleficent is too powerful for me to reverse it,” Merryweather said, but her expression of consternation relaxed into thoughtfulness. She pulled out her wand and turned towards the prince. She flicked a sparkling trail onto the prince. “Should Maleficent’s curse come to pass, he will not die, but merely fall into a deep sleep… and he will wake upon receiving a kiss from his true love. That’s the best, I believe, that I can do.” 

*

A cottage tucked deep within the woods was, in fact, a wonderful place for a boy to grow up. The woods were nestled within a glen at the edges of the kingdom, and what it lacked in human companionship, it more than compensated with the promise of adventure and the thrall of freedom. 

The cottage itself was snug for three peasant women and a young man who had only recently grown into his broad shoulders. His head nearly skimmed the rafters now, and even without their anxious monitoring of each year passing by, the fairies knew that it was nearly time for their adopted son to depart from them and assume his rightful place at court. They had spent eighteen years scanning the skies for Maleficent’s raven, taking turns scouring the woods for shadowy creatures hunting for the prince. Eighteen years wiping tears and cleaning cuts, trying to keep the curious boy from wandering away from the home they had built for him. Eighteen years watching the prince grow from a toddling child to a gangly adolescent to a young man.

The king never quite approved of their foolhardy plan to spirit the prince into the woods and raise him in modest environs, shielded from both spindles and the spying eyes of Maleficent’s cronies, but Queen Leah had held firm. “If we had had a daughter,” she had said to her husband in the harshest tone she had ever unleashed upon him. “You would have gathered up all the spinning wheels in the kingdom and set them ablaze. The flames would have burned for a fortnight. You would have happily destroyed the livelihoods of our people and ruined our trade relations for the safety of our daughter. And for your heir, you do nothing? Because you believe a child would know by gift of god which tasks more suit a woman than a man?” 

The king knew then that if he did not agree, he could lose both his wife and his son, and so he granted his permission. 

These memories were seared in the fairies’ minds, ever more vivid as the fateful day drew near, but their beloved Briar knew nothing at all of his past or of his future. 

On the morning of the eve of his eighteenth birthday, Briar stood at the window and gazed at the spires in the distance that poked above the pines and spruces. The fairies were bustling around him, rearranging cutlery, sweeping the clean floor, trying their best to project an atmosphere of busyness that would encourage a young man who was too busy daydreaming to help to, at the very least, make himself scarce. Fauna glanced sideways at the boy, jerked her head towards the outdoors, and gave other two an inquiring look. Merryweather shrugged, and Flora tapped her chin in thought. 

Briar pretended not to notice their conspiring. 

“Flora, Fauna, Merryweather,” Briar said. “I dreamt of a girl last night. She was absolutely beautiful. She had hair like spun gold all the way down to her waist.”

“Is that right?” Merryweather said. She picked up a few jars and shifted them around in the cupboard. 

“We met in a clearing, and we danced. I don’t know why I knew how to dance, but I did, in the dream.” 

“You must be a natural talent, my dear,” Fauna said. 

Briar continued, “Then she took my hand and put it on her–”

“That’s quite enough, darling,” Flora interjected. “Why don’t you go gather some wood to chop? We’ll be having a great feast tonight, and we’ll need a fire up to the task of cooking it.” 

Briar grinned. “Don’t you want to hear the rest of my dream?”

“I think that we will all be all right without hearing the rest of it. Oh, look at that, it’s already midday and we have so much cleaning to do!”

“I can help,” he offered.

“No, no, Briar, we need wood, wood to use in a fire, a fire to use for cooking. Isn’t that right, Fauna?”

“Yes, of course,” Fauna said, flipping through a large tome on the floor. “Did you know that this book we’ve been using as a footstool actually has some recipes in it?” 

“What your Aunt Fauna means to say is,” Flora started to say.

“Chop chop!” Merryweather finished her sentence. “Off you go!” She grabbed his cloak and tried to drape it around his shoulders with a little hop. 

Amused, Briar took the brown cloak from her and fastened it himself. “All right, then, I’ll leave you to whatever the three of you have been muttering about for the past week. I’ll gather wood enough for a bonfire.” As he walked out the door, a few logs from the heap by the cottage rolled to the ground with a series of thuds. 

“You’re sure that’s not enough already?” he asked, pointing at the logs piled up to the eaves of the cottage. 

“Oh no, not by far!” said Merryweather.

“Don’t speak to strangers!” said Flora.

“Goodbye!” said Fauna. 

Long accustomed to ambling around in the woods with nary a goal, Briar decided to head in the direction of the castle. The woman from the dream was still on his mind. He could feel the lingering warmth of a phantom hand in his, and he flexed his hand in an attempt to dispel it. A few rabbits darted around the bushes beside him, pausing occasionally and twitching their noses at him as if inquiring after his thoughts.

Then –

“SKUMPS,” a discordant, but enthusiastic, voice ricocheted through the trees. “SKUMPS, SKU-U-UMPS.”

“What is that awful sound?” Briar asked a rabbit. “It sounds like the groans of a dying creature.” He tried to follow the caterwauling, but his foot caught on a raised root, and the ground came rushing up at him. He blindly threw out an arm to save himself, and his fingers wrapped around a low-hanging branch. He hardly had time to exhale a sigh of relief before the branch cracked, and down he tumbled again. 

“Ow,” he said through the dirt. He lay there face down, waiting for the pain in his everywhere to subside. Through the haze, he noticed that the _skumps_ ing had ceased. 

“Are you hurt?” a feminine voice asked.

“No,” Briar said, unmoving. 

“Would you like help up?” the voice asked. 

“I would not,” Briar said. “But I might need it.” 

“An important distinction in other circumstances,” she said. “But perhaps less so in yours.” Briar felt a tug at his shoulders and rolled into it, and he saw the woman from his dream kneeling over him, looking at him with a mix of mirth and concern. A circlet of silver roses in her golden hair scintillated in the daylight. She had blue eyes, he observed. He remembered that. 

“Oh. Were you the one singing?” Briar asked, dazed for more than one reason. “Was that a song?”

“Just something my father likes to sing with his friends,” she said. 

“The words weren’t exactly the source of my skepticism,” Briar said. “It was more the tune. Or lack thereof.”

The pain had diminished enough for him to regret those words as soon as they had left his mouth, but the woman appeared untroubled by his insult. She looked rather pleased.

“No one has ever told me that,” she said. 

“I find that hard to believe,” he said. 

“Well, I’ve seen the grimaces and wincing, certainly, but everyone always tells me that my voice is divine. Yet, here you are, a peasant lying in the dirt, implying that my singing is rather more profane.” She put a hand behind his back and helped him sit up. 

“Yes, I’d go with profane,” Briar said, hoping the word meant something like bad but not quite as extreme as dire. “Or, well. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to insult your singing. No, I did mean to, but – thank you.”

“You are welcome,” she said. She stood and dusted off her knees, though any smears of soil would have been indistinguishable from the color of her kirtle. The edges of her pink wool gardecorps swayed with her movement as she returned to her horse’s side and gathered the reins in her hands. “Well, I suppose I’d best get going, now that I’ve rescued my damsel in distress of the day.”

“I’ve seen you before,” Briar blurted. He was more aware than he’d like of how he was sitting in the dirt, staring up at the mouth of a woman he had just met, and he clambered to his feet with a groan. 

“How funny,” she said. “I don’t remember you at court.” 

“Not at court,” he said, thinking _at court?_ “In a dream.” 

Briar braced himself for mockery – even to his ears, the words sounded ludicrous and desperate. 

But the woman did not laugh. Instead, she startled. “In a dream?” she said. 

“We danced. In the dream, that is. I don’t know how to dance. Dancing hasn’t come up much, between all the woodcutting and the wood-stacking and wood-bundling.”

“Tell me more.” She dropped the horse’s reins.

Briar’s face broke into a grin. 

* 

A funny thing about being a princess, Aurora had learned early on, was that people had all the wrong sorts of expectations for you. They expected you to learn to curtsy without tipping over and mount a horse without toppling over and understand rudimentary medicine and embroider complex mythological tales and read Latin and play chess and command falcons and sing and dance, but even after all the education that they thrust upon her, they often forgot that you knew how to do half of them. 

Aurora constantly felt underestimated.

And even as she sat chained in Maleficent’s dungeon, her back damp from the moss sliming the cold stone walls, her wrists bruised from straining against the iron handcuffs, she felt like the evil witch could have tried a bit harder. 

Maleficent had not bothered to conceal her delight when Aurora appeared at the cottage door, looking for the handsome stranger she had encountered in the woods that day. Her howling laughter crackled with triumph as her minions swarmed the princess and effortlessly knocked her to the floor. Aurora could have sworn that damn bird smirked at her when she was on the floor of the cottage. The gremlins wound black ropes around her wrists and ankles and stuffed her mouth with cloth, and when Maleficent magicked them all back to the forbidden mountains, the ropes were replaced with chains and shackles. Then the witch had taken her leave and abandoned her prisoner unsupervised but for two guards at the door for what felt like hours. 

It was a relief when the witch reappeared to gloat.

“This is far too easy, Princess,” Maleficent said, a hand rubbing the glowing orb of her scepter. “I can imagine what kind of a daughter a simpleton like Hubert has raised. He fears women with power.”

“Like you?” Aurora asked.

Maleficent chortled. “Me, a mere woman? Oh, how I regret that you’ll be left here to rot. You do make me laugh. Perhaps I shall visit you soon, in half a century or so, to have a little chat and to show you how the dear prince sleeps on while mortality will have hunched your back and withered your glowing skin.”

“You didn’t kill him?” Aurora said. “In that case, you’re neither powerful nor a woman. Perhaps you mistook my father’s indigestion for fear when you last convened. I do tell Father that he shouldn’t overindulge in the roasts, but he never listens to me.” 

The dark fairy narrowed her eyes at the princess, her black pupils slit-like against the yellows of her eyes. “You’ve got quite the mouth on you.”

“I think I’m hilarious,” said Aurora. “What a pity that everyone in this kingdom is asleep, and you don’t seem to appreciate my humor. My deportment tutor thinks I could be a jester.”

Maleficent waved a hand, and the chains yanked Aurora’s wrists above her head and pinned them to the dungeon wall. The fairy glided closer to the bench where Aurora was perched and loomed over her.

Aurora inhaled sharply. She wriggled, trying to pull her hands through the clamps. She felt so exposed with her arms stretched above her and her torso arched. She tried to move her feet, but the previously slackened chain seemed to have snapped taut somehow, forcing her to plant her feet slightly farther than shoulder’s width apart. 

Her deportment tutor would not approve of this unladylike position.

“Yes, an entertainer,” Maleficent said. “Of a different sort.” She brushed Aurora’s jaw with her middle finger and then cupped the princess’ chin in her hand. She yanked her head to the left and then to the right, up and then down. “You might indeed be wasted down here in the dungeon, when you could provide a greatly valued brand of diversion.”

“How dare you,” Aurora said, ignoring the heat coiling within her, and continued to struggle. “It is so unfortunate— how underappreciated— court jesters are.”

Aurora stilled when Maleficent lowered her head just a few inches above her own. The witch’s fingers were as cold as the wall behind Aurora, but her breath was surprisingly warm. 

“Hm,” Maleficent said. “Interesting.”

“What?” The syllable emerged shakily from her mouth. 

“I wonder what the prince would say about this, my sweet princess.” Without letting go of Aurora’s face, Maleficent dropped her other hand to the princess’ collarbone, exposed where her chemise had ripped during her abduction. Maleficent lightly traced a line along the dip, and Aurora’s breathing grew more labored. 

“Would he still love you if he knew that such depravity festered behind your angelic exterior?” Maleficent said, her voice smooth and low. Her hand fell further, glancing over Aurora’s breasts and skimming across her stomach, coming to a rest on her inner thigh. The witch squeezed, and her nails dug into her flesh through the thin fabric of her kirtle.

“I—” 

“What was that?” Maleficent asked.

“I guess I’ll find out.” Aurora slipped her hands down from the manacles still cleaved to the wall, swiped a hunting knife from her boot, flung herself forward, and plunged it into Maleficent’s heart. 

The witch’s eyes widened in shock, and she stumbled backwards. The magic that had fettered her feet dissolved, and Aurora fell to her hands and knees. In her right hand she gripped a silver hairpin; she had detached one of the hairpins securing her circlet. 

Shrill laughter pierced the air. Storm clouds gathered above her and lightning flashed, and the odor of sizzling flesh permeated the dungeon cell.

“Did you truly believe, princess, that that would be enough to kill me?” Maleficent hissed.

Brambles began to twist up from the dungeon floor, reticulating dangerously around the princess on her knees. Thorns nicked her face and limbs as the tangle thickened. Though the diminishing gaps in the snarl of spins, Aurora could still see the witch’s face ablaze with fury, its hard edges illuminated in the lightning. But her face was morphing, shifting in the chaos of light and shadow, its feminine contour assuming a reptilian one. Her dark robes flowed outwards around her, dissipating and reassembling as coal-black scales. Wings burst from the creature’s back, and green flames flickered among arrays of dagger-like teeth. It was getting larger.

“This is not ideal,” Aurora muttered.

A spark threaded through the brambles and careened towards her face.

“Fuck,” Aurora said. 

The spark swerved in front of her nose and dove onto the hairpin that she was still holding. An incandescent flare swallowed the hairpin, and Aurora snatched her hand away as if she were burnt.

The flare grew and grew, shredding the vines touched by its light until the entire cage lay in tatters around her, and a sword glowed where the hairpin had been. 

Aurora did not care about the provenance of the sword. She hauled it upwards with both hands and then threw herself towards the pall and lightning. More sparks struck the blade, and it lightened in her hands.

“Throw it,” someone shouted.

She halted, took a large step back, and launched it like a javelin towards the dragon.

The sword struck true. 

A horrendous noise ripped from the creature’s throat. 

Aurora stood with her gaze fixed on the morbid spectacle before her and her hands on her knees, willing her pulse to return to a normal rate. She would never forget the way the dragon spasmed and flailed, wings flapping and tail thrashing, but the moments afterwards, when the dying beast shrunk back to its fairy form, dissolved into dust, or vanished in a puddle of evil cloak, she could not recall. 

Sparkles of red, green, and blue rippled beside her.

“Thank you,” Aurora said. 

“You’re welcome,” the fairy in a red dress said. 

“You’re the only one who can save the prince,” said the fairy in blue.

“Seems like it,” Aurora said. She looked at the three fairies. “Um, how long had you been watching?” 

“Well,” said the fairy in green.

“No time to waste,” said the fairy in red. “True love’s kiss, then waking the palace, then celebrating the return of the prince, then a wedding! Follow me!” She flitted out of the dungeon.

“Flora knows best,” the fairy in green said and followed suit.

“She thinks she does anyway,” grumbled the one in blue, but she too gestured for Aurora to follow. 

* 

The fairies waited outside the door. 

When Prince Phillip’s eyes fluttered open, Aurora was seized by a moment of fear that he would be not recognize her in this bloodied and battered state. Perhaps it was too forward of her to have slotted her body against his and placed her hands on his chest before leaning down to kiss him. But her doubt was assuaged as clarity swiftly replaced the drowsiness in his eyes, and he slid an arm around her waist and gently pressed her back down to kiss her again.

“Why would you touch the spindle?” Aurora asked him.

“I’d never seen such an oddly-shaped contraption before, and I wanted to get a closer look,” the prince said, sleepily taking her hand in his. Black and purple bloomed on her wrist, stark against the pallor of her skin. “And then I tripped. What happened to you?” 

“I saved your life,” she said. “Again.”

“I don’t know that I deserve you.” 

“You do have your charms,” she said airily.

“Did you know my name was Phillip? Flora told me just before all this happened.”

“No,” she said. “I found out from the evil witch who tried to kill you. And then me. She was probably going to go after everyone, eventually.”

“You might have to remind me that it’s my name. Phillip doesn’t sound very much like Briar.” 

“I think I can do that,” Aurora said. “I did know that I was betrothed to a Phillip, and I’m very heartened to know that it’s you and not some other prince named Phillip.” 

“Good,” he said. And it was.

They tied more than one kind of knot – as Aurora soon learned that, enjoyable though it had been to be bound, tying Phillip up begot even greater pleasures – and they lived happily ever after.


End file.
